NEWS: Richard Milward @ House of Blah Blah, Middlesbrough

The writer brings his surreal exhibition to his home town

By Peter Cumiskey
on Sunday, May 24th, 2015

Newsflash: it’s spring. This may have passed you by, given the at-times-tempestuous, at others just down-right-drizzly weather. This month, Teesside artist and novelist, Richard Milward, presents a series of his ginormous paintings – part celebration of the Great British weather, part Day-Glo medication for seasonal affective disorder.

Middlesbrough’s latest with-it venue, The House of Blah Blah, has been attracting some damn impressive exhibitors since opening last year. Milward’s Trip Around The Sun collection comprises all manner of cartoon gods and ghouls, painted in retina-burning acrylics, and revolves around life, death and rebirth. His figures take inspiration from the Hindu gods, each reigning over a skewed vision of spring, summer, autumn and winter.

This is the kind of exhibition where you should expect to find a Santa-capped skeleton and strawberry-headed Shiva, sitting in lotus position alongside worm-infested apples and hallucinogenic mushrooms, erupting around a pumpkin-headed Halloween fiend (intended to represent autumn and winter, in case you were wondering).

A celebration of rebirth, reincarnation and lots of other things beginning with ‘re-‘, this should act as a stark warning. As the artist puts it, “with the exhibition opening on the night of a general election, we can only pray we wake in the morning with our eyeballs, brainwaves and bright futures still intact”. More fool you if this leaves you still longing to stare into the sun.